In many professions it is necessary to maintain extensive data records which extend over a period of years. Often these records are generated at a variety of different physical locations, under a variety of different conditions, stored in different physical locations, and accessed at different times by different people for different reasons. A good example of such a situation now exists in the medical profession where a patient's medical history spans a large number of years, is usually generated by several different physicians working in cooperation with several different laboratories and diagnostic centers.
While it would be ideal to believe that there is one care provider who maintains all of these diverse records, the reality is that this is simply not so. However, even if it were to be true that there is a central depository for the medical records of a patient, simply moving the data from the inception source to the storage location is a hugh task fraught with the possibility of errors, not to mention the time delay involved with the physical copying and transporting of each record. Often in emergency situations, where time is scarce, a physician must have immediate access to data contained on a graph or from a pictorial image that is physically resident at a remote site, such as the MRI facility of a hospital. In such a situation, the physician must rely on someone else to interpret the data over a telephone connection. Because of the unexpected nature of certain medical conditions, the timing is not always convenient to retrieve documents which are stored remotely from the attending physician and, thus, valuable time is lost and medical treatment must be rendered based upon a best guess scenario.
It is not uncommon for a patient who has undergone a series of tests to have to wait a week or more before the test results are gathered by the diagnosing physician so that the physician can then make a proper diagnosis. In some situations the patient's condition could have changed dramatically in such a time. It is not unheard of that test results have been lost or damaged before they reach the proper care provider.
One answer to such a situation is to place a large majority of the diagnostic facilities and laboratories in or near a common facility, such as a hospital, and to confine the patient to the hospital while all of the tests are run. In addition to being very costly, and perhaps effective for true emergency situations, this system does not resolve the issue of moving the gathered data to the different people who must then have immediate access to the data. Because of the high cost of medial care there is usually a third party, such as an insurance company or a medical board of review, who must also have immediate and concurrent access to the data in order to approve of a certain course of treatment.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a broadly accepted system for storing records and for communicating these stored records to and from a number of different locations.
There is a further need in the art for a system where medical records are stored in a manner such that they can be retrieved at any time from any location by the person who requires access to the records, such retrieval being accomplished in real time and in a secure manner.